As storage needs increases, solutions have to be found to drive the cost of storage down and maintain ease of management. The use of a Chord based network (a peer-to-peer technology) partially solves certain problems. The use of self organizing finger tables solves the problem of scaling by avoiding the need of centralized information. The use of intelligent routing limits the number of request to reach a node. The use of consistent hashing also limits the impacts of modifying the network topology (when adding or removing nodes, when nodes fail).
The use of a Chord network ensures overall consistency of routing (except some limitations), self-organizing stabilization but does not provide a real way to replicate information, nor to rebalance content in case of topology change.
Best practice solutions move the complexity of managing storage into dedicated storage systems to save application servers from embedding storage disks directly, avoiding many inconveniences such as disk failure management, data loss, data reconstruction, and enabling economics of scale by better managing a shared pool of storage resources. Typical technologies include:                SAN, Storage Area Networks where storage is centralized into large dedicated proprietary storage cabinets that export their storage capacity in the form of block device volumes        NAS, Network Attached Storage where medium sized storage devices export their disks as network file systems.        
Object stores that do not follow the centralized architecture design can be deployed on a large cluster of generic servers, pushing fault tolerance on the software and the network stack rather than dedicated storage hardware.
Because SAN technology is block based as opposed to file based and slices storage capacity into monolithic volumes, solutions derived from this technology cannot perform storage optimization based on files or objects and have to manipulate small anonymous binary blobs called blocks with very little metadata attached to them. Recent improvements such as thin provisioning, i.e. over allocation of storage space for each volume to minimize the need for growing existing volumes are natural evolutions.
Object stores are re-emerging and put more emphasis on metadata and file awareness to push more intelligence into the storage solution including file access patterns and domain specific metadata that can be utilized to implement per file classes of storage. For example, an email platform using an object store instead of a volume based approach could add metadata declaring a message as legitimate, undesired or high priority. The object store could use the metadata to change classes of storage appropriately. For example, the system may maintain only one copy of illegitimate messages or keep high priority messages in cache for faster access.